Journal ArticleDOI
Desert Migrations: people, environment and culture in the Libyan Sahara
David Mattingly,Marta Mirazón Lahr,Simon J. Armitage,Huw Barton,John Dore,Nick Drake,Robert Foley,Stefania Merlo,Mustapha Salem,Jay T. Stock,Kevin White,Muftah Ahmed,Franca Cole,Federica Crivellaro,Mireya Gonzalez Rodriguez,Maria Guagnin,Sebastian Jones,Vassil Karloukovski,Victoria Leitch,Lisa A. Maher,Farès Moussa,Anita Radini,Ian Reeds,Toby Savage,Martin Sterry +24 more
TLDR
The Desert Migrations Project as mentioned in this paper is a new interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional collaborative project between the Society for Libyan Studies and the Department of Antiquities to address the theme of migration in the broadest sense, encompassing the movement of people, ideas/knowledge and material culture into and out of Fazzan.Abstract:
The Desert Migrations Project is a new interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional collaborative project between the Society for Libyan Studies and the Department of Antiquities. The geographical focus of the study is the Fazzan region of southwest Libya and in thematic terms we aim to address the theme of migration in the broadest sense, encompassing the movement of people, ideas/knowledge and material culture into and out of Fazzan, along with evidence of shifting climatic and ecological boundaries over time. The report describes the principal sub-strands of the project’s first season in January 2007, with some account of research questions, methods employed and some preliminary results. Three main sub-projects are reported on. The first concerns the improved understanding of long-term climatic and environmental changes derived from a detailed palaeoenvironmental study of palaeolake sediments. This geo-science work runs alongside and feeds directly into both archaeological sub-projects, the first relating to prehistoric activity and mobility around and between a series of palaeolakes during wetter climatic cycles; the second to the excavation of burials in the Wadi al-Ajal, exploring the changing relationship between material culture, identity and ethnicity across time, from prehistory to the early Islamic period (the span of the main cemetery zones). In addition, some rock art research and a survey of historic period sites was undertaken in the Wadi ash-Shati and Ubari sand sea.read more
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Ancient watercourses and biogeography of the Sahara explain the peopling of the desert
TL;DR: The dating of lacustrine sediments show that the “green Sahara” also existed during the last interglacial and provided green corridors that could have formed dispersal routes at a likely time for the migration of modern humans out of Africa.
Journal ArticleDOI
Saharan trade in the Roman period: short-, medium- and long-distance trade networks
TL;DR: The authors examined the evidence for Saharan trade in the Roman period in the light of recent fieldwork in the Libyan Sahara by the Fazzan Project and the Desert Migrations Project and by the Italian Mission in the Acacus.
Journal ArticleDOI
Lithic landscapes: early human impact from stone tool production on the central Saharan environment.
Robert Foley,Marta Mirazón Lahr +1 more
TL;DR: The lithic-strewn pavement created by this ancient stone tool manufacture possibly represents the earliest human environmental impact at a landscape scale and is an example of anthropogenic change.
Journal ArticleDOI
DMP V: Investigations in 2009 of Cemeteries and Related Sites on the West Side of the Taqallit Promontory
David Mattingly,Marta Mirazón Lahr,Andrew Wilson,Hafed Abduli,Muftah Ahmed,Steve Baker,Franca Cole,Mireya Gonzalez Rodriguez,Matt Hobson,Victoria Leitch,Farès Moussa,Efthymia Nikita,Anita Radini,Ian Reeds,Toby Savage,Martin Sterry +15 more
TL;DR: The Burials and Identity team of the Desert Migrations Project carried out two main excavations in the 2009 season, at the monumental Garamantian cemeteries of TAG001 and TAG012, by the Taqallit headland.
Journal ArticleDOI
DMP XIII: Reconnaissance Survey of Archaeological Sites in the Murzuq Area
TL;DR: A reconnaissance survey in the Murzuq area, some 150 km south-east of Jarma, was carried out as part of the 2011 field programme of the Desert Migrations Project, with separate funding from the Leverhulme Trust for this element of work entitled the ‘Peopling the Desert Project’.
References
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Book
Late Roman Pottery
TL;DR: The authorsACETHIS The authors is based on a PhD thesis with the title "Late Roman Pottery in the Mediterranean", submitted to the University of Cambridge in 1964, and has been completely reworked and considerably enlarged for publication, though the fundamental conclusions remain virtually unchanged.
Journal ArticleDOI
Shorelines in the Sahara: geomorphological evidence for an enhanced monsoon from palaeolake Megachad
Nick Drake,Charlie S. Bristow +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used Landsat TM images and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) digital topographic data to reveal numerous shorelines around palaeolake Megachad.
Journal ArticleDOI
Multiple phases of North African humidity recorded in lacustrine sediments from the Fazzan Basin, Libyan Sahara
Simon J. Armitage,Nick Drake,Stephen Stokes,Ahmed El-Hawat,Mustapha Salem,Kevin White,P Turner,Sue McLaren +7 more
TL;DR: In this paper, Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) was applied to key lacustrine deposits within the Fazzan Basin in an attempt to provide an internally consistent chronology for this humidity record.